


Patterns

by ammcj062



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Between Episodes, Case Fic, Gen, Research
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-29
Updated: 2018-09-29
Packaged: 2019-07-20 09:33:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16134524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ammcj062/pseuds/ammcj062
Summary: These are the peaceful parts of Sam’s life.





	Patterns

Here is how the pattern goes.

It starts with an obituary from one of the twenty regional newspapers Sam has bookmarked: the ones with enough sensationalism to publish strange details of murders and lesser crimes, but enough budget that they don’t lock their content behind a paywall. Some of them have more advertisements than content – but Sam uses an adblocker when he can, and learns to alt-f4 the popups for the sites that force him to turn it off. Even with the distraction of sexy singles in his area, it’s a far cry from his childhood memories of pouring over outdated copies of local news, zigzagging slowly through the states until Dad found something to hold his attention.

They still wander aimlessly between jobs, but these days it’s to satisfy Dean’s perpetually itchy feet. They can pick a city and stay there for a few days if the wifi at their motel is good enough – even longer when the local bar has free wifi, too. In those towns Dean gathers gossip while Sam perches at a corner table with a packet of fries beside him, half-spilled onto a napkin so Dean can swing by and nab a couple between sips of beer. By the end of the night Dean is happily satiated with conversations with strangers and Sam is content with his own version of interacting with the larger world, absorbing the hum of a local watering hole without per se being part of it.

Sam wipes his fingers on his napkin one last time, drains his beer, and creates a new folder in the maze of folders on his desktop organized by geographic region. He downloads the obituary and the CSV files he’s been browsing of different crime statistics for Arizona, saves his text file of notes, and shuts down his computer for the night. Dean comes back from settling their tab just as Sam wriggls back out from under the table, unplugged charger in hand.

They swap stories on the way home. Neither of them found anything substantial, but Dean heard of a story from Washington he’s going to try and read up on. When their week is up at their motel, it’s time for them to position themselves further west. Sam tumbles into bed quickly when they arrive back at the motel. He throws an arm over his eyes to block out Dean’s sidelamp and falls asleep to the soft shush-shush rhythm of Dean brushing his teeth.

In the morning Sam continues his research: number of deaths split up per county, missing persons records summed up by year and season, fact checking a half-dozen forum screenshots he’s sure aren’t the truth but isn’t quite sure are totally false. The folder grows. A few interesting threads that start unraveling away from Sam’s current focus are stashed away into new folders themselves. Sam populates a readme file for each of them so he can pick up the ideas later; he has a dozen or so folders to keep track of, and the frustration of retracing his own steps is never one he likes experiencing. Some days he’ll skip from folder to folder, reviewing what he’s collected and grinding his teeth at each dead end. Today is a good day. He gets into the rhythm of his research, flipping deftly between spreadsheets and online research, winding through different paths of thought without dropping the one it branched off from.

Dean wakes up an hour or two after Sam does, leaves for coffee, comes back with a cup for Sam, browses on his phone and concludes his lead from yesterday was just an exaggerated bar tale, strips down to a tank top and grabs the toolbox out of the car. He leaves Sam in peace until noon, then bullies him outdoors to get some sun. Sam glowers and has to chain together two extension cords before his charger can reach the bench outside. His computer is from Stanford, one of the few belongings he has from before the fire, and the battery is starting to fade.

Outside the breeze plays with his hair and it’s overcast enough he doesn’t have to worry about burning his nose or glare on the screen. The clanks and ticks of Dean’s work combined with his intermittent humming to the radio is a familiar background noise Sam can easily tune out. Despite how he grumbles, it’s nice to get out of the crappy motel chair he hadn’t realized was digging into his spine. Sam has started to notice his bones aching sooner in uncomfortable furniture, and it hasn’t evaded his notice that Dean always prefers sitting on one of the motel beds. He files it away in a mental folder – alongside Dean’s beer paunch, Sam’s barely-receding hairline, and a list of dates moving further and further away. It’s not an investigation Sam can solve, however. He observes and records, and refocuses on his current research.

Sam taps away at the keyboard while Dean fiddles with the car, absently rolling the beer Dean passes him between his palms while he stares at graphs and thinks about correlating evidence. When asked, Dean offers a couple ideas of his own that Sam adds to the list of data points to analyze. Once the publicly accessible information has been exhausted Sam spins up his VPN service – one of the few things they don’t pay for with scammed cards – starts up a remote session, and enters the login credentials he’d found beneath a police station’s keyboard three towns back. Dean limits himself to a single Neo joke while Sam pulls data from NCIC.

When Sam starts going cross-eyed from spreadsheets he calls over Dean, who’s been fiddling with the Impala just to fiddle with it for at least the past half-hour. They make a habit of browsing through gas stations for the most detailed topographical maps they can find of an area, squirreling them away in the trunk for moments like this. It’s one of the things Sam still prefers doing on paper, not least because a physical map usually comes in handy once they’re on site.

Dean digs out a map from a few years back of central Arizona and they spread it across the top of the trunk. Sam leans against the side of the car with his laptop and reads off locations to number. It looks promising – definitely a cluster of deaths – so Dean switches between colors and they start writing in more details: date of death, days until discovery, phase of the moon, any abnormalities noted by the medical examiner for the subset of results whose reports have been digitized.

Sometimes this is where an investigation will fall apart. They’ll look at the data and realize they’re seeing monsters because they want to, building up layers of unrelated activity into something they can fix. Today they look at the map and start mentally segmenting their findings, sifting through the variables and still come out with something in the end. Dean taps on the map a moment before Sam was about to. Take away an outlier or two that made it through Sam’s initial filters, and there’s still a pattern. Deaths to the west of that point when the moon is waxing; deaths to the east of that point when the moon is waning.

They’ve paid for two more days, but they were already planning on ditching the card they used. If they leave today and drive hard, they can be there the day after tomorrow. Sam packs the laptop away, tucks some books in the front seat for research on the drive west. Dean takes a shower to wash off the car oil. They head out within half an hour, scent fresh on the wind.

In a few weeks, Sam will move that folder to a zipped archive in his documents. All of their closed cases live there, a sort of mental tally Sam keeps with himself. He will close out three other ones as dead ends, leave the rest open to monitor and collect more data. New folders will appear, in the days Sam and Dean are more brothers on the road than hunters on a trail. That is how their pattern goes.


End file.
